My attempt at this month's theme

[Stan Cunningham]

Never done one of these before, but this shot from last week took very little work.
Never crazy about a fence line as a perch but it is a flycatcher.

Canon 7D 100 -400 5.6L
F 9.0 1/640 ISO 500 manual resting on truck window (no bean bag that day)
PS was minimal to get the white background,
selected background and added just one stop
selected the eye of the VF and used curves to bring out the eye.
selected bird and took exposure down 1/3.
cloned bird poop off the fence
comments always appreciated, high keys are not my thing, but this is interesting.
Colors of the bird help as they have their Sunday best on this time of year.
Stan

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Generally high key is not achieved at all in post-processing, other than painting out dark spots that might occur in the background. It is achieved in low contrast light (cloudy, overcast) and a subject that is darker than the background. The image is purposely overexposed, careful not to clip the highlights of the subject or you'll loose details. This overexposure blows out the background(clips it), and it becomes white. In post processing the scene is darkened, the exposure of the subject normalized, and details that where not recorded in the background because it was too bright, are not going to show up. Again, occasionally small areas of the background may not be completely blown, and simply painting white (or whatever color the background is) over these areas is needed.
This image looks like a considerable crop, and as I said earlier, high-key doesn't involve simply painting in a lighter background. regards~Bill

[Stan Cunningham]

Thanks Bill, I have a couple more of this same bird where I would not have had to lighten the background but they had a lot of veg near the bottom. However, I get your point and that's why I post on eager to learn.
It's probably about a 1:30 crop, so not that great, why do you say that? I'm not that crazy about the image, just wondering if you noticed something I didn't.
Stan

[WIlliam Maroldo]

Hi Stan. The image quality is a bit off, not really by much, and it seemed consistant with a bit too heavy handed with the cropping, since the techs seem solid.
Substantial cropping always causes image degredation, even with the best camera, lens, and technique. What is frustrating is that when the degree of cropping is not given, problems can easily mimic a number of other causes and suggestions, other than getting closer to the subject or more focal legnth with the lens, will not solve the problem. I'm not sure how much you cropped the image, and I am not clear how much you cropped anyway (a 1:30 crop?).
To me the most meaningful, and least confusing, description would be in MP. "I have a 17MP camera and I cropped to 5MP", for example. This is particularly useful in Adobe Camera Raw, and I assume other RAW converters, since the MP of the image is listed at the bottom, and the MP value changes after the image has been cropped.

That being said, it is my experience that once you drop below 5-6 MP you run into problems. This would translate into roughly a 50% crop of a 12 MP camera. Of course there are other factors, and with a particularly sharp image you may be able to crop a bit more. I am talking about web presentation, where 5 MP would seem to be more than adequate. After all you will be reducing size quite a bit more, but for some strange reason it doesn't work that way.

regards~Bill

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Stan, you got a nice capture of this little guy. A bit more of a curves adjustment of the darker tones would help this one, as well as a little more lightening of the eye. The triangle between the bird's right leg and the perch got left behind in the processing. I like the placement of the flycatcher in the frame.

The term "high key" has come to be rather loosely interpreted in photography, but it might be worth talking about where the concept came from. In film-making, the term "key light" refers to a strong light that is pointing directly at the subject. In the early days of film and television, this technique was used extensively because it was cheap and easy to reproduce from one scene to the next. High key lighting was typically done using three key lights - one frome the left, one in the center, and one to the right - all shining directly on the subject. Photographers started using the technique in the studio, typically using strong direct lighting on a subject against a white cyclorama backdrop. The main concept of high key, as Bill points out, is reducing the contrast in the image. This is done by lighting the backdrop strongly so that the subject tends to blend with it and have low "modeling", which refers to the contrast of the subject and the highlights that this produces. For this reason, there are a lot of b&w high key images, since the tonalities are much reduced in comparison to color. In nature photography, we try to capture high key images of lighter colored subjects against a "white-out" background as described by Bill.

Of course "low key" is just the opposite as far as light, but the concept of contrast reduction remains the same.